Poor kid got her lady parts snipped on Tuesday.
The Boyo and I may have been laughing a great deal at her expense since then.

She can’t figure out how to keep her head up when she’s navigating stairs,
so she keeps running into them like a confused Roomba;
when we take her outside in the rain, it fills the cone like a traveling aquarium–
the more disconcerted she gets,
the harder we laugh.

I tried to tell Nami that Lady Gaga wishes she had thought to wear a plastic cone
to the Grammys instead of that tired ol’ egg trope,
but I don’t think she cared.

That’s way too old to still be storing my clothes
in a three-drawer crappy plastic bin from Wal-Mart.

I was taking Le Pooch for a walk,
and sauntered past a dresser ditched by the side of the road.
I come from a loooong line of dumpster diving trash pickers,
so naturally,
I stopped to take a look at it.

It’s maple,
probably from the early 70s,
and still in (fairly) decent condition.

There was no way I could drag it home by myself,
though I did allow momentary visions of hooking The Damn Dog up to a sleigh
and hollering “MUSH!” over her head.

Now,
the last furniture liberation project I had was back at my old Inglehood place–
On a dark and stormy night,
I convinced The Boyo to help me get an enormous dresser
(I had to ditch the drawers, since they were so beat up)
made of particle board, weighing in at about 200 pounds,
covered in rain and mud,
into the back of his Kia,
with me perched on it, since the rear door wouldn’t shut,
up the very steep hill and two flights of stairs to my apartment.

He’s a trooper.

And,
consequently,
when I dropped a hint that there *might* be another dresser down the street
that *could* use a little love…
he was…um…reluctant.

(gosh, and it wasn’t even raining!)

Not to mention the fact that most of his belongings
are in the back of our old friend The Kia,
since he’s in the middle of a move,
so if liberating was to occur,
it would have to be with our four arms and legs.

I asked him to just come look at it with me;
and somehow,
we ended up carrying it home two blocks.

At night.

In a city that doesn’t really believe in street lights.

There may have been a couple of smashed fingers along the way,
but all in the name of home improvement, my friends!

(oh hai, Boyo! I love you!)

That last project,
fondly called “The Behemoth”,
took me nearly three months start to finish–
it was the first piece of furniture I’d ever mucked with,
and there were a few…miscommunications…regarding paint and polyurethane and primer and…
yeah.

I ended up finishing the whole thing incorrectly,
and had to sand it ALL back down and start over again.

It took forever.
And there may have been tears.

But it turned out bea-yew-ti-fully!

Picture this without all the accoutrements--pretty, oui?

So when I picked this dresser up,
I knew that I didn’t want to be quite as anal about it,
especially after the look of consternation Roommate Jessie gave me
when I gave her an estimate of three weeks to get it done.

Rather beat up...and 70s...but look at that maple!

Oh, the poor thing!

(I had to create a workspace on the back patio with a tarp,
a couple of bungee cords and a handy patio umbrella.)

I love me some big-ass tarp, y'all.

I started poking around for ideas,
and came across Centsational Girl,
who made this lovely piece of magic:

*gasp!*

Seriously?

You can water down paint without it,
I dunno,
mangling or otherwise causing your furniture to implode?

SWEET.

I ran down to Home Depot and picked up two sample paints by Behr,
one in Pool Table Green,
and the other in Realm,
watered them down just enough to make the paint thinner,
and mixed them together to get a true peacock blue.

They are flat finish,
which weirded me out at first,
but ended up looking lovely under a satin finish poly.

The great (AWESOME) thing about using watered down paint
is that your brushstrokes don’t matter as much.
When I painted The Behemoth,
I agonized over making the top absolutely perfect,
which is difficult using an eggshell finish latext paint.

This time?

I just slapped the stuff on there–
and it was actually fun!

I wanted this piece to be a bit imperfect,
a bit rough,
and I really wanted the warm maple tones to show through.

(I had a bit more repair work to do than I thought initially,
which involved judicious amounts of Elmer’s Wood Glue,
and since I am clampless,
strapping tape–and it worked okay, but clamps are on my “I should have these around because they’re kinda handy, yo” list.)

The other great thing about using watered down paint
is that it dries faster,
which meant that I was able to paint all nine of the drawers
AND poly them in the same day.

DUDE!

Apologies for the fuzziness...as is my wont, I often worked on this after dark...

It took me five days to finish this sucker–
including the Cephalopod detail on the side and drawers.

Oh, and here's our dresser presenter of fluffiness, NAMI!

Isn't he cute?

So preeeeetty!!!

Five.

Days.

Now,
my back isn’t happy with the speed in which I knocked this out,
but it does mean that I won’t have a messy project going now that
Her Fluffiness the Corgi is living here.

I used a Purdy paintbrush for Latex paints for this project. Purdy’s are expensive as heck, but totally worth the spectacular results.

I used this pearlescent paint from Modern Masters for the Cephalopod detail,
and painted it on with my water color brushes.
It is a bit…truculent to work with, but turns out pretty.

The polyurethane I used was Miniwax’s Satin Finish.
I may hate poly with the fires of hell,
but it makes for less-easily-destroyed furniture.

I wasn’t able to finish The Behemoth with a coat of poly
(shiny finish black furniture = Chinese lacquer = SHUDDER),
and it’s constantly in danger of getting scratched.
That won’t be a problem with this dresser.